How Not to Defend the Liberal Arts

The National Association of Scholars has released a report on the state of liberal education. Taking Bowdoin Collegein Maine as a representative example, the report argues that America’s liberal arts colleges are failing students by lowering academic standards, substituting highly specialized courses for broad surveys, and encouraging trendy political activism at the expense of serious study. These claims are staples of conservative or traditionalist critiques of higher education, but that doesn’t mean they’re false. Unfortunately, the NAS study is written in a way that makes it unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with its conclusions.

The problems begin to emerge in the opening pages, which include a foreword by Bill Bennett and prefatory letter by Thomas Klingenstein, a board member of NAS and the Claremont Institute whose encounter with Bowdoin president Barry Mills inspired the report. In different ways, each contribution signals that the report is a sermon for the faithful rather than an attempt at conversion.

Bennett begins by asserting that “Plato… remarked that the two most important questions in society are ‘Who teaches the children?’ and ’What do they teach them?’” Unfortunately, Plato “remarks” no such thing, at least in any of the works known to me (I invite readers to correct me if I’m wrong). I suppose that the phrase could be a reasonable, if rather simplistic summary of Plato’s thought about education. But the actual source appears to be a Michelle Malkin column. The phrase also appears, without a specific citation, on a number of cut-and-paste quote sites. Misquotation happens all the time, of course. But it’s a bad start for a defense of traditional education–particularly one that claims that Bowdoin students aren’t learning enough about Greek philosophy.

Klingenstein’s letter reflects a more serious problem. It is addressed to “to all Bowdoin alumni, but in particular to those over the age of, say, fifty to fifty-five, a line that more or less demarcates old Bowdoin from new.” I cannot imagine an appeal more likely to alienate readers outside movement conservatism. By appealing explicitly to nostalgia for mostly white and (until 1971) all male “old Bowdoin”, Klingenstein places the report right in its critics’ crosshairs.

The authors’ tin ear for readers’ sensibilities is in evidence throughout the report. In particular, the report shows no sympathy for students who doubt, with some justification, that old Bowdoin had room for them. Acknowledging such doubts does not mean agreeing that cheerleading for “difference” is the best remedy. Rather, it should be the starting point for the argument that traditional liberal arts education has something to offerall serious students.

The report does little better appealing to potential readers on the faculty. Here, the challenge is to demonstrate that critics of the college status quo understand the intellectual and professional context in which academics work. The report fails do that.

A small, but telling example of this failure is the report’s self-description as an “an ethnography of an academic culture, its worldview, customs, and values.” It’s actually nothing of the kind. The report is based on considerable research in public documents and some interviews with students. But it includes none of the direct observation or explicit reflection on the way that observation can influence outcomes that characterizes academic ethnography. There is no more effective way to tick off professors than to misuse a technical concept. That’s especially true when that concept is supposed to describe the study’s relationship to the faculty itself.

More importantly, the report tends to conflate interest in traditional subjects and teaching styles with political conservatism. It also associates conservatism with support for the Republican party. That’s precisely the opposite of the argument that defenders of a traditional curriculum ought to make.

One reward of teaching Plato, for example, is students’ discovery that classical philosophy cannot be associated with any specific political commitments. Indeed, it challenges all modern ideologies. And as for professors’ partisan allegiances, let’s get real. It is quite difficult, and correspondingly rare, for anyone who takes scholarship seriously to get excited about an organization so consistently and loudly anti-intellectual as the current incarnation of the GOP.

Finally, largely because it focuses on official records rather than direct observation, the NAS report gives readers little idea of what actually happens inside the classroom. Yet this information is crucial to answering the report’s titular question “what does Bowdoin teach?”

The real, and damning, answer is: “it’s hard to say.” That’s because Bowdoin has long ago abandoned any institutional commitment to an integrated curriculum. The report explains in one of its most interesting sections that Bowdoin made a fateful decision in 1970 to replace the old core curriculum with loose distribution requirements. Since then, what Bowdoin teaches has been determined by institutional happenstance and student choice rather than any substantive vision of the knowledge and skills worthy of a human being.

The consequences of this self-inflicted wound are not limited to the loss of intellectual coherence. Although its cultured despisers often miss this point, the old-fashioned curriculum was also egalitarian in a way the cafeteria model of course selection is not. With the assistance of responsible advisors (which is not agiven, but by no means uncommon), students who graduate from private schools and top public high schools with strong basic skills and cultural literacy can usually design a fine course of study for themselves.

It is much more difficult for students who never received a true college-preparatory education. Since professors trained in specialized research are often reluctant to teach introductory classes or cultivate the rudiments of reading, writing, and quantitative reasoning, these students can easily get lost intellectually and socially. In effect, if not in intention, the cafeteria curriculum is a concealed mechanism for the reproduction of privilege. Under the cover of freedom, it offers the greatest advantage to students who already understand the system.

A real ethnography of an elite liberal arts college might investigate this paradox. It might also tell the stories of professors who face the challenge of “selling” demanding courses to students burdened by few requirements in departments oriented toward publication rather than teaching. I suspect, or at least hope, that a study of this kind would find a favorable reception among academics of various political political stripes who are dismayed by lowered standards, gimmicky classes, and administrative fads, but recognize that there’s no return to the old days. The NAS report is a missed opportunity.

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56 Responses to How Not to Defend the Liberal Arts

It’s odd that people often discuss the State of the American Family and the State of American Higher Education, but the common conclusions of the former discussion rarely seem to inform the latter, although the two issues are intimately connected in real, day-to-day-life. (likewise with the so-called “health care debate” of a few years back, in which the outrageous and exorbitant educational expense of actually becoming a health-care professional was not mentioned once by either “side” of the “debate”)

Emerging college freshmen today are arriving from very different American households than forty years ago. You can’t expect a child who has been taught (likely by a single mother, or a grandparent or step-parent) his entire life to Go Along to Get Along, Sit Down and Shut Up, take an amphetamine pill in order to stay still and memorize information and instructions if you have “Attention Deficit Disorder” (why isn’t there an “attention surplus disorder?”), Come Home to an Empty House and Play Video Games for Three Hours, etc. etc. to suddenly develop critical thinking skills at age eighteen, after being assigned a few Socratic dialogues. That horse has left the barn and galloped into the sunset. Only Rebels spontaneously happen. Productive Independent Thinkers have to be raised from birth.

Children in American elementary school are educated to be un-troublesome industrial laborers, period.

And indeed, massive societal re-structuring has occurred outside elementary schools–from “Family Court”to “Gay Marriage”–to make them more malleable in that capacity. And that is despite the fact that most of the industries have disappeared or become drastically less labor-intensive.

And of course it has been that way for generations now, so most of the adults alive today, even up to and including University faculty and administrators, are products of that same absurd assembly-line “educational” process, which is why the entire civilized world today seems helpless against the “adult leadership” of Technocrats who are really Overgrown Children in every sense of the term except the good spiritual one, and even more so today than has historically been the case…and that is also why it can’t really be changed or fixed. Happy Sabbath Everyone!

The ideas in a classical liberal education are what is important, but the curriculum itself needs to be modernized. The Western world was extremely influential over the past few centuries, but the pendulum now swings the other way, and there is a great deal of wisdom in the Eastern world that we would be wise to incorporate…for they have incorporated our wisdow.

The thing about Plato, and his mentor Socrates, is that they were deemed a threat to society because of their challenging ideas…ideas we now view as the bedrock of our own society. We must not lose sight of the fact that Socrates believed (strongly) in challenging every idea, every thought, ever ideology and philosophy. NOTHING was to be accepted until it had been prodded and pondered, turned around and spun inside out. A thing needed to be fully understood before it could be fully accepted. The Socratic Method is one of my favourite teaching methods. I use it to turn the many assumptions that we Westerners have on its head. Shake out the nonsense and see what sticks.

I do NOT see a need to study Latin or Ancient Greek. There is only so much time to devote to education (before it must translate into application), so we must be wise and strategic is the requirements we put upon university students.

I align myself with Sean G, especially when is says “there is only so much time to devote to education (before it must translate into application)….” So much of the curriculum is now given over to specialization that the precious hours grudgingly permitted for General Education must be used very judiciously. Unfortunately, a bad side effect in curricula of otherwise positive efforts to advance the cause of social justice (race/class/gender studies) is the buffet approach to electives. This approach works against studies aimed at nurturing the spirit of critical thinking, replacing it with targeted ideological objectives.

Plato’s Dialogs are dramas, devices for inviting us to think things through for ourselves. We can only surmise what Plato’s beliefs were. The Epistles, written in the first person, are of doubtful authenticity.